I have encountered the "Phishing Detected" warning in Chrome browser on my dev site. Interestingly I don't encounter the same warning in Firefox or Safari even though, as far I can tell, they are using the same phishing database (although in Safari preferences it says "google safe browsing service is unavailable"). I also don't encounter the warning on the same page of the production sites.
It first popped up on a new account verification page I created which amongst other things asked users to confirm their PayPal account with the GetVerifiedStatus API. This requires only name and email.
I have also encountered the warning on a configuration page which asks for the PayPal email address which the user wishes to receive payments to.
Neither page requests a password or any other data that would be considered a secret.
As you might gather I have zeroed in on a potential false positive on the PayPal portion of the content as if perhaps I am phishing for PayPal information beyond the payers email address. There has been no malicious code injection or any such thing. Even when i've removed all content from the page the warning is still present.
I reported the first incorrect detection to Google, and intend to do the same for the second incident, however what I really want to clear up is:
What content can lead to this warning?
How can I avoid it in the future?
How can I get some info from the "authorities" on which urls are blocked? (Webmaster Tools is not showing warnings for the dev site)
How can I flush my local cache of "bad sites" in case I want to re-test?
Clearly having a massive red alert presented to a user on a production site would be disastrous, and there is a (perhaps deliberate) lack of information about how this safe browsing service actually works.
I have been developing a website for a banking software developer and ran into the Phishing warning as well. Unlike you I had no PayPal associations in any of my code and well not even any data collection besides a simple contact form. Here are some things I managed to figure out to resolve my false positive warnings.
1) The warnings in Chrome (red gradient background) is a detection method built into the Chrome browser itself and it does not require to check any blacklists to give the warning. In fact Google themselves claim that this is one of the methods that they discover new potentially harmful sites. When your site is actually on the blacklists you get another red warning screen with diagonal lines in the background. This explains why you only see the warning in Chrome.
2) What actually triggers this warning is obviously kept kind of hidden. I could not find anything to help me debug the content of my site. You have pretty much done this, so for anybody else in need of help, I had to isolate the parts of my site to see what was triggering the warnings. Due to the nature of the site I was working on it turned out to be the combination of words and phrases in the content itself. (e.g Banking Solutions, Online Banking, Mobile Banking). Alone they did not trigger anything but when loaded together chrome would do its thing. So I'm not sure what your triggers are or even what the list of possible triggers are. Sorry...
3) I found that simply quitting Chrome completely and restarting it resets the "cache" for whether it has perviously detected a page. I closed Chrome hundreds of times while getting to the bottom of my warnings.
Thats all I have and hope it helps.
Update: My staging area was accessed via an IP address. Once I moved the site to use a domain instead all the warnings stopped in chrome.
I experienced the same today while creating an SSL test report for my web server customers. What I had there was simply something like this:
"Compare the SSL results of our server to the results of a well-known bank and its Internet banking service". I just wanted to show that the banking site had grading B whereas ours had grading A-.
I had two images from SSL-Labs (one the results for my server and the other the results of the bank). No input fields, no links to any other site and definitely no wording about then name of the bank.
One h1, two h2 titles and two paragraphs plus two images.
I moved the HTML to the page and opened it in my Chrome browser. The web server log told me that a Google service had loaded the page after 20 seconds from my first preview. Nobody else had seen it so far. The phishing site warning came to me (webmaster) in less than an hour.
So it seems to me that the damn browser is making the decision and reporting to Google which then automatically checks and blocks the site. So the site is being reported to Google by Google tools, the trial is run by Google and the sentence is given by Google. Very, very nice indeed.
Related
I was checking the Application tab in the Chrome DevTools to debug an analytics issue and I noticed that the cookies section was empty, although the cookies menu under the lock icon in the chrome search bar seemed to show the cookie that I was interested in.
I did a bunch of refreshing, clearing site data, and restarting Chrome with no change in behaviour.
Is this a bug in Chrome? Why is there a discrepancy between the two menus? Does it have to do with httpOnly or secure cookies?
Not a very important question, mostly just curious!
I don't have an authoritative answer on this, but I think the explanation is in the language on top of this dialog: It says "The following cookies were set when you viewed this page". So it just shows whatever was set originally – or even "at some point" when you viewed the page. The message is not clear on this detail.
I can definitely confirm from my own tests that it will keep listing cookies that have since been deleted. Dev tools however always show the current state of cookie storage.
Whether it's a bug or not I suppose one could discuss at length, seeing as the behavior is not in conflict with the description. But it's certainly not expected behavior, and its usefulness for non-technical users is I think at least questionable.
This also lists "folder" type entries for indexed DBs, local storage and session storage which are not useful at all because you can't drill down. All of this and the missing punctuation on the message on top makes me think this is orphaned or forgotten code.
I also have no idea where that info is stored or how one might be able to purge it.
ETA: After some more experience with this discrepancy, I have since come to the conclusion that the list shown via the lock icon will show any kind of write access to the cookies. Since there is no dedicated "delete" operation for cookies, but you delete them by setting them with an expiration time in the past, deletions would still count as write access. So it looks pretty much like the dev tools seem to be only showing cookies that are still effectively there, i.e., would be sent to the server in a request, while the list in the lock icon is just a log of write accesses to cookie storage. This is still not definitive, but completely fits all my observations so far.
I have Adblock and Adblock Plus extensions in Chrome browser. I spend a lot of time doing intentional shopping and get blocked from things I don't want to be blocked from. For example if I search google for a "hotspot", I want to research various devices available. But when I click on one (sponsored link at the top of the search results), I get an error page that says
This site can’t provide a secure connection
ad.doubleclick.net sent an invalid response.
Try running Windows Network Diagnostics.
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
I don't mind these "ads". They are useful. Is there a way to configure AdBlocker to allow them?
My IT department admitted this is a filtering policy. Quite unfortunate since looking at ads for new technology IS A HUGE PART OF MY JOB
But Its a lie
I am facing this issue with my installer:
Installer exe when downloaded from the websites in Chrome are flagged as being malicious software.
To overcome this problem so far we have tried changing domain names,but its not a permanent solution.
Even after signing my exe with Thawte certificate the flag is still there.
I have scanned my exe with all popular AVs and there is nothing malicious in it.
How can I get rid of this chrome flag?
The webmaster site doesn't do anything to help with the false positive on installers. All it does is tell you the file is potentially malware without giving you any way of appealing or asking for a review of their findings.
With FireFox and Chrome and others using this data, you would think Google would provide a way to appeal. It is ironic the company starting the false positive initiative with Microsoft is the worst offender in creating false positives.
You may be able to get around the issue by supplying your site's URL to "Google Webmaster Tools". You don't even have to supply a URL for every single "malicious" file; an overall, top-level URL for your site (or, for your little corner of Blogger.com) seems to be adequate.
If you've got a Google account, just log in and go to this URL. There's a prominent textbox with an "Add Site" button next to it that does the trick. This worked for me, in a matter of minutes (and I don't have a "certificate", other than the one I got for winning a raft race in Pre-K).
Oh, and I too have experience working in heuristics, as part of my degree. "Heuristics" are really just what ordinary, unpretentious people call "rules of thumb"!
It may be that Chrome is using heuristic analysis, to determine that this file is "malicious". That is to say, it is basically saying "Because this file possesses these qualities, we therefore believe this file to be malicious".
Given that a few years ago, someone got hold of a root certificate authority, and proceeded to make genuine security certificates (so that people wouldn't be suspicious, and because they were actually genuine, browsers did not notify the user), for their sites which asked for personal data (bank username and password, etc), and stole it, until that authority was annulled a few days later.
Therefore, simply having an .exe with a certificate (a genuine one, which of course, you have), won't suffice, in Chrome's mind, for the above two reasons.
I'm sorry I can't tell you how to get rid (or at least alleviate somewhat) this issue, but I thought it'd be helpful for you to have some possible reasons as to why this is occurring.
**EDIT: Sources to back up my claims: http://news.techworld.com/security/3266817/online-fraudsters-issue-fake-security-certificates-for-google-yahoo/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14819257**
I also have experience working in heuristics, as part of my programming degree.
Whenever I send a GET-request to my webapp using chrome, according to my apache access log two identical requests (not always, but most of the times, I can't reproduce it - it's not for the favicon) get send to the sever, although only one is shown in the chrome dev tools. I deactivated all extensions and it's still happening.
Is this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872177 true and is it a chrome feature or should I dig deeper within my app to find the bug?
I think it's even worse than that. My experience here (developing with Google App Engine), is that Chrome is making all kinds of extra requests.
This is possibly due to the option that is in the Settings, checked by default:
Predict network actions to improve page load performance
Here is a really weird example: my website's page runs a notifications check every 15 seconds (done in javascript). Even after closing all tabs related to my website, I see requests coming from my IP, some random pages but also the notification check request. To me that means that Chrome has a page of my website running in the background and is even evaluating its javascript.
When I request a page, I pretty much always get another request for one of the links in that page. And it also requests resources of the extra pages (.css, .js, .png files). Lots of requests going on.
I have seen the same behavior with the development server that runs locally.
Happens also from another computer / network.
Doesn't happen with Firefox.
Also, see What to do with chrome sending extra requests?
I need to capture image from web page without security warning.
Page where i need webcam functionality can not be switched to https protocol.
I've installed root certificates and made them trusted.
I tried to insert iframe (which pointed to secure protocol https://mysecurepage.com) inside page (http://mypage.com), but not worked.
#bjelli is correct - this is a major security flaw for any internet content. Just imagine if you could go to a website which would start taking photos/recording everything going on without any permissions or notifications!
However, I am working on an intranet project where disabling the prompt would be quite safe.
If you are in this sort of position - there is one thing you can do;
Google Chrome Policies
If you are deploying the browser, you can override the security prompt for sites you specify. I don't know if you are working in such an environment, but this is the only way you can avoid the prompt all together. Similar things probably would apply for other browsers too.
As defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/mediacapture-streams/
When the getUserMedia() method is called, the user agent MUST run the following
steps:
[9 steps omitted]
Prompt the user in a user agent specific manner for permission to provide the
entry script's origin with a MediaStream object representing a media stream.
[...]
If the user grants permission to use local recording devices, user agents are
encouraged to include a prominent indicator that the devices are "hot" (i.e. an
"on-air" or "recording" indicator).
If the user denies permission, jump to the step labeled failure below. If the
user never responds, this algorithm stalls on this step.
If a browser does not behave as described here it is a serious security problem. If you find a way of making a browser skip the "permission" you have found a security problem.
What do you do if you find a security problem?
Report it IMMEDIATELY! Wikipedia: Vulnerability Disclosure
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/security/#For_Developers
Internet Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ff852094.aspx
Safari: https://ssl.apple.com/support/security/
Chrome: http://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/security/policy
This is not just a question of technical possibilities, it's also a question of
professional ethics: what kind of job would I not take on? should I be
loyal to my customer or should I think of the welfare of the public? when do I
just follow orders, when do I stop bad stuff from happening, when do I blow the whistle?
Here are some starting points for computing professionals to think about the ethics of their work:
http://www.acm.org/about/se-code
http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
http://www.gi.de/?id=120